


once more unto the breach

by MasterOfAllImagination



Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Second Person, episode tag: 3x08, hints of slash, okay maybe heavy hints
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 11:12:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8246746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasterOfAllImagination/pseuds/MasterOfAllImagination
Summary: Your mind is a scale.  It is a scale in the following ways:It measures.It is metallic.It is filled with weight.





	

Your mind is a scale.  It is a scale in the following ways:

It measures.

It is metallic.

It is filled with weight.

Jack Bristow smiles at you sometimes: and here you use the term “smile” quite loosely, for After-Irina Jack has not much been one for smiling. But still, a smile is the best word you know for the twitch on one side of his mouth, for the way his eyes dart from yours, for the way his hands briefly loosen from their perpetual half-fists at his sides.

You have a memory that is bright like over-polished copper of a moment when Jack _truly_ smiled at you-- not at Laura (he did so, often) nor to Sydney (even more often), but to you yourself. You don’t even remember what you said. (By _god_ you wish you remembered what you’d said, so you could say it again.) His teeth are all visible and his eyes wrinkle to nothing. Happiness seeps from the gaps between his eyelashes.

As you look at him, now; stalking these unhallowed halls, you see the chains that slow his steps, like Marley’s burdened ghost. They all have women’s names.  They are weights: in Jack’s heart, but also in your mind, and they are heaviest when you catch Jack having to remember to bring his expression back up to “neutral” from “despondent.” If there was something you could do, you’d do it, but Jack stopped accepting help from people long ago.

You still offer.

Three years later you force him to accept by taking a bullet for him.  As pathetic as it is, the impromptu surgery that follows is the most physical contact you and Jack have had in years. It reminds you how much you once burned for it. Hands trace your chest in efficiency. Consciousness leaves you several times, and upon waking you look to him immediately, searching for softness.

It’s never there. Still, you search anon. He is your salvation, after all. Redemption, like the waltz, doesn’t work without a partner.

With parchment between your fingers-- _Rambaldi’s_ parchment, you think; that _his_ hands have touched the same as yours now do-- you wonder how many times you have touched the things that Jack has touched.

A thousand manila folders.

Keyboards.

A piano, circa 1986.

Sydney Bristow.

Irina Derevko.

It isn’t a long list. Fixated, now; you put down Rambaldi and go to a safe hidden behind a traditional picture frame and remove from it a small envelope. Inside the envelope are pictures: Emily, Sydney, Jack, Irina. A few of the old boys from the CIA days. You stole them from Jack when he moved out of his house After-Irina. Jack would never have kept them. He doesn’t have a single sentimental bone in his body. You, however, have several: you suspect the ribs that surround your heart of being foremost among them. At times you suspect your skull as well.

(None of the pictures feature Jack’s smile-- you’ve looked for traces of it in the blurry prints often enough, so you really shouldn't have to look again.)

The pictures go back safely in their envelope. Safely behind the painting. Rambaldi waits for you on the table, as welcoming as a woman’s arms, nearly as familiar as Emily had been, more forgiving than any friend you’ve ever had.

(Just the one friend, really. You’ve only ever had one friend. You need to remember that. A man can’t survive in this world without the support of his friends.)

When next you see him it is with bars in the middle. They break up the symmetry of his face-- one over an eye, and then, as he moves, over his nose and mouth. This is unacceptable, so you move up close to the bars, as close as you can, wrap your hands around the cold metal like you’re wrapping them around your own life and _look_ at him, really look. Really see the man Jack Bristow has become.

And god, he‘s nearly unrecognizable from the vital thing he‘d been Before-Irina, but nor can you tear yourself away. Because what he is now is good, too. A good man. What a rare thing! Your fingers itch to peel away and reach through; take him by the lapel and shake him until he understands this thing you feel so adamantly in your heart: _you’re a good man, Jack. You’re nothing like me. And don’t you forget it_.

You need him to be a good man, if your plans are to come to fruition. You want him to be a good man, for the sheer pleasure of it-- of him.

(You had kissed Irina and thought of Jack; you had watched Sydney draw a gun and thought of Jack; you had held a Rambaldi artifact in one hand and wished that he’d been there to hold the other in his.)

Kisses-- kisses are another thing that is best done in twos. Two people, two pairs of lips. Victories are sweeter when shared. The hardest line you’ve ever had to draw-- and in your life, you’ve had to draw too many: CIA/Emily, wanting children/never having children, SD-6/Emily, and Rambaldi/Jack. Almost too late you realized that your love for Rambaldi was forcing away Jack’s love for you. He was afraid of it. Weak, for fearing it. Jealousy you could have understood and forgiven. Possessiveness, surely. But not the shrinking of an old cloth when exposed to new air.

You yourself had receded a little when that line had been drawn.

But now here you are again: closer than ever. A mind like a scale free of weights on the side of the demons, and a whole fistful on the side of the angels. And Jack has put them there. Sydney is safe-- because of you. Jack is alive-- because of you. Jack’s whole world is resting on the fulcrum of your good graces and you can almost reach out and spin it like a basketball balanced on a finger, if you wanted to.

When the helicopter lands, you almost do. He takes you aside and thanks you. You have to use all your CIA training to bury the giddy laugh that wells in you for the sheer irony of the situation: Jack, gritting out his gratitude in some misplaced notion of honor (he’d had that before the CIA, and SD-6 had never managed to break him of it). And you, being thanked; when _Jack_ is the one who should be on the receiving end of it instead:  _Thank you for letting me rescue her,_ you think. _Thank you for thanking me_ , you add. _Thank you for being a good man. Thank you for trusting me just this little bit more-- because I need you to. For this to work, I’ll need your trust._

You don’t say that. You should have been an actor in another life.

Jack lingers a bit too long, his arms a bit too stiff, the air between you a bit too close. So you make the right decision for both of you, lick your lips, clasp his shoulder wordlessly, ignore the flinch, and walk away. Serves Jack right, for not taking what he wants. Serves you right, for not taking what you want.

You spend the entire night on the merciless canvas cot in the abandoned (but safe) warehouse where you’ve all gone to ground thinking about a similar night in Bogota when you had reached out your hand and brushed against possibility, only to snatch it back at the last instant. The flesh-memory of Irina Derevko still fresh and unsatisfying and heavy in your head. And there he was, tired and vulnerable, and you having been the one to make him so.  If only you’d gotten it out of your system then. But it’s been thirty years and a thousand miles of empty space and missions and cutting words and jokes delivered a bit too brutally. Wrong decisions and the way you could ignore the lack of an apology, afterward.

Jack would have felt _so good_ wrapped up in your arms.

On nights like these, you dare to change the tense of the _would have_ into something more hopeful.

Sometimes you could barely move but for the weight of wanting. In a briefing. On a plane. In a safe house. On comms. Over a bad phone connection. Can he hear it in your voice? You certainly don’t try to hide it. He’s a master dissembler. He’s a stone wall, when he wants to be; and a blank canvas when he doesn’t. Emotions don’t really make it out of Jack’s heart, the way wine can’t flow from a corked bottle, because decanting them was a skill Jack unlearned After-Irina. You wish you could teach him again, but that would involve removing the cork, and Irina did her work of jamming it back in there too efficiently. God damn Russians. The only patriotic fervor he’d ever felt was in sympathy with the American detestation of that degenerative country and its small, narrow people.

Your mind is a scale. On one side, you pile up all the love you have ever felt: Emily, Jack, Sydney, Jacqueline, Nadia, Jack again, Sydney. On the other side, you lay down Rambaldi, and it is so heavy that the imbalance sends all the rest to scattering.

It takes much longer to set them up again than it ever does to put Rambaldi back.

It tires you. It is harder every time. It takes longer every time. There are fewer of them every time.

But sometimes Jack smiles at you, and--

_Once more unto the breach._

**Author's Note:**

> I spend a lot of time thinking about how Sloane's mind works, these days. This is sort of how I envision it, although I have perhaps erred too far on the side of emotion and not enough on the side of logic.


End file.
